John Hopkins

Artist Info

John HopkinsWednesbury, Staffordshire, 1520 - 1570

LC name authority rec. n n84077631

LC Heading: Hopkins, John, -1570

Biography:

Hopkins, John (1520/21–1570), psalmodist and Church of England clergyman, was born at Wednesbury, Staffordshire. Nothing is known of his family or early life. He is probably identifiable with the John Hopkins who supplicated for the degree of BA at Oxford in March 1544 (he ‘determined’ in 1545). After Oxford Hopkins seems to have migrated to London and become acquainted with Edward Whitchurch, printer of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer and Thomas Sternhold's Certayne Psalmes in English metre (STC 2419). On 22 August 1549 Whitchurch was one of the witnesses to Sternhold's will. On 24 December 1549 he published Al such Psalmes of David as Thomas Sternehold late grome of the kinges majesties robes, didde in his life time draw into English metre, in which Sternhold's texts were followed by a preface to the reader, signed I. H., and a separate sequence of Psalms 30, 33, 42, 52, 79, 82, and 146 (in later editions attributed to John Hopkins). These, Hopkins explained, were added ‘especially to fyll up a place ... that the booke maye ryse to his juste volume’, implying a commission by the printer (T. Sternhold, Al such Psalmes, sig. G2v). There is no evidence that Hopkins knew Sternhold personally and no likelihood that they collaborated; Whitchurch provided the link between them.

Whitchurch worked in Fleet Street, which provides circumstantial evidence for identifying the psalmist with the John Hopkyns ordained deacon on 2 November 1551, and priest, on 15 May 1552, by Nicholas Ridley, bishop of London. The ordination record of 1551 gives his age (thirty) and place of birth, and describes him as resident in the parish of St Bride's (Fleet Street), London, for the past four years. Nothing is known of Hopkins's whereabouts between his ordination and his institution to the parish of Great Waldingfield, Suffolk, on 12 August 1561 by John Parkhurst, bishop of Norwich; on 11 May 1563 Hopkins was also instituted into the living of the neighbouring parish, Chilton.

During the 1550s, if not before, Hopkins may have been a schoolmaster. Edward Hake's dedication of A Compendious Fourme of Education (1574) reminds John Harlowe how they were ‘trained up’ together ‘with the instructions of that learned and exquisite teacher, Maister John Hopkins, that worthy Schoolemaister, nay rather, that most worthy parent unto all children committed to his charge of education’. Hake (b. c.1544) came from Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, and may have been at school there. He appears to be name-dropping in mentioning Hopkins, who was widely known from 1562, when John Day printed The whole booke of Psalmes, collected into Englysh metre by T. Starnhold, J. Hopkins & others: an amalgamation of his two earlier collections of eighty-two psalms (1561; STC 2429) and The residue of all Davids psalmes in metre, made by John Hopkins and others (1562; STC 2429.5).

By 1562 Hopkins had composed fifty-four new psalm versions replacing twelve of William Kethe's versions printed in 1561 (Psalms 27, 36, 47, 54, 58, 62, 70, 85, 88, 90–91, 94) and three of William Whittingham's (Psalms 50, 67, 71), whereby it seems that contributions by Marian exiles were being demoted. Hopkins also composed versions of Psalms 24, 26, 28, 31, 35, 38–40, 45–6, 48, 55–7, 59–61, 64–5, 69, 72, 74, 76–7, 80–81, 83–4, 86–7, 89, 92–3, 95–9, and 102.

Hopkins's reputation has been distorted by association with former Anglo-Genevan exiles who became the focus for non-conformity in the Elizabethan church. In part this is because, as with Sternhold, his literary reputation as a metrical psalmist was based on texts which were substantially revised by Whittingham and others for the use of the Anglo-Genevan community in 1556 (STC 16561; and STC 1475–1640, 2.87–90, table of liturgies; for the unrevised London editions printed up to 1553, see chart of editions in STC, 1475–1640, 1.99–103).

Hopkins's will, dated 10 October 1570, made his wife, Anne, his principal heir and sole executor, and shows a concern for the supervision of his son's education, making it more likely that the rector of Great Waldingfield was Hake's former schoolmaster. For five years after his death Hopkins willed that his son John should be brought up in learning, at the grammar school, at his wife's costs. Thereafter he left £20 ‘to be bestowed uppon hym in Learninge’ under the supervision of Thomas Spencer, rector of Hadleigh, Suffolk (who had supplicated for his BA degree the same date as Hopkins) or Edward Colman of Waldingfield. He also bequeathed to his son all his Latin books. He left £10 to each of his daughters, Martha and Sara, and also ten lambs to Martha ‘to be delivered to her when her mother shall se good’, indicating that this Suffolk pastor also tended real sheep. There were small bequests to servants and friends, and, significantly, provision of 6s. 8d. for some learned man to preach a funeral sermon in Waldingfield on the day of his burial. To Colman, who was to supervise the will, he gave his copy of ‘master bolinger his sermondes uppon the Revelacon in english’ (H. Bullinger, A Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalyps, 1561), which Parkhurst had directed ministers in his diocese to procure. Hopkins was buried at Great Waldingfield on 23 October 1570.

Hopkins's literary reputation in print began with John Bale who referred to him in 1559 as ‘not the least significant of British poets of our time’ and one who would make the Psalms known to his posterity ‘by the elegant, harmonious arrangement of words in English measures’ (Bale, Cat., 113). Thomas Fuller (1662) celebrated the English metrical psalms and Alexander Pope allowed that ‘Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with Psalms’ but saw their ‘pathetic strains’ as the means by which the ‘Boys and Girls whom charity maintains / Implore your help’ (A. Pope, Imitations of Horace's Epistles, bk 2, no. 1, lines 230–32). Sternhold and Hopkins were never partners in life, but in death their names have been inseparable. Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1774–81) suggested that Hopkins was a better English poet than Sternhold, but generally, the ballad measures and popular diction of these lyrics alienated those who aspired to more refined poetic fashions. From 1562 until the 1690s the Elizabethan metrical psalms were the best-known English verses because every English man, woman, and child sang them in church. Hopkins was the author of the largest number, 61 out of 150 psalms.

Rivkah Zim

Sources STC, 1475–1640 · GL, MS 9545/1, fols. 9v, 11r · Norfolk RO, DN/REG 13, book 19, fols. 55, 81 · Reg. Oxf., 1.208 · will, TNA: PRO, PROB 11/52, sig. 36 · Suffolk RO, FL 514/4/1 · E. H. [E. Hake], ‘A compendious fourme of education’, A touchstone for this time present (1574) · R. Zim, English metrical psalms: poetry as praise and prayer, 1535–1601 (1987) · Bale, Cat., 113 · Bodl. Oxf., MS Ashmole 1126, fol. 46v · DNB · H. Robinson, ed. and trans., The Zurich letters, comprising the correspondence of several English bishops and others with some of the Helvetian reformers, during the early part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 1, Parker Society, 7 (1842), 99 · A. Pope, ‘The first epistle of the second book of Horace imitated’, The poems of Alexander Pope: a one-volume edition of the Twickenham text, ed. J. Butt (1960), 643; repr. (1970)

Rivkah Zim, ‘Hopkins, John (1520/21–1570)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/13748, accessed 17 Nov 2015]